Project Portfolio

This effort is part of AHRQ's ongoing work to accelerate the dissemination and implementation of patient-centered outcomes research, or PCOR, findings into practice. The three Centers of Excellence will identify, classify, track and compare health care delivery systems to understand the organizational and environmental factors affecting the use of evidence-based medicine.

The RAND Center of Excellence will examine health systems in five regions with the goal of understanding the role of incentives, use of health IT and organizational integration within systems and its impact on performance and evidence dissemination.

PI:  Dennis Scanlon

As the costs of treating cancer continue to soar, several organizations have produced value frameworks to identify and highlight high value treatments that provide a favorable balance of quality and cost. However, few include hospital-based outcomes measures other than survival. This study evaluates  whether oncology patients’ risk-adjusted ED rates can be used as a hospital-level measure of quality and value of care.

PI:  Joel Segel

This project is organized around the following domains: support around understanding PacMAT service provision outcomes; changes in site capacity due to PacMAT; patient relapse; morbidity and mortality outcomes; patient service utilization and claims (cost) outcomes; a qualitative analysis to understand implementation of the PacMAT program including variation across sites in order to provide feedback to site operators; and providing medication assisted treatment (MAT) focused continuing medical education credits to practitioners, furthering statewide reach.

PI:  Joel Segel & Max Crowley

The year-long intervention involves 16 weekly classes over the course of the first 6 months followed by monthly classes for the remaining 6 months on topics related to diet, exercise, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The intervention will be conducted by Penn State Health practitioners in conjunction with researchers from the University and members of the Penn State Office of Human Resources. In addition, Penn State researchers led by a team from HPA and CHCPR will conduct an evaluation to understand the program’s effect on weight loss, blood pressure, glycemic levels, and other relevant clinical outcomes. A known limitation of the national DPP relates to enrollment and retention challenges. To better understand how to improve retention and achievement of DPP clinical goals, the study will also involve a randomized controlled trial where cohorts will be randomized to treatment arms that will include motivational messaging and varying types of financial incentives to incorporate important concepts from the behavioral economics and health communication literature.

PI:  Dennis Scanlon

Evidence-based policies such as transfer guidelines for hospitalized patients have the potential to impact public health, but only to the extent that they are actually used.  Laws are an important mediator of the relationship between the research that creates the guidelines and their public health impact, as they influence what providers do and thus what care patients receive .  However, there is currently insufficient research on the extent to which laws actually affect provider behavior. 

PI:  Charleen Hsuan

The Penn State team produced a report structured around an overall framework showing the conceptual linkages between alleged behaviors undertaken by opioid manufacturing and distributing companies that may have contributed to the opioid epidemic and the resulting costs borne by states. The team examined the scope of damages from five areas of concern:

1) Health Care Utilization costs

2) Child Welfare and Youth Services costs

3) Criminal Justice costs

4) Education and Special Education costs

5) Employment and Disability costs

PI:  Dennis Scanlon

The PA Rural Health Model was established under the authority of  the Social Security Act, which authorizes CMS to design, test, and evaluate innovative payment and service delivery Models that have the potential to reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending while preserving or improving the quality of care received by beneficiaries. This study is an evaluation of the Rural Health Model.

PI:  Dennis Scanlon

In 2019, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh (HACP) adopted an innovative housing program designed to address limitations in the voucher program and to promote greater racial equity in neighborhood access – the mobility vouchers program. Mobility vouchers are designed to facilitate eligible families to use vouchers in “mobility zones ”, neighborhoods that are racially integrated, have low concentrations of poverty, and have greater access to jobs, quality health care, and full-service grocery stores. This project studies the mobility vouchers and mobility counseling program as a means to increase housing choice, economic opportunity, residential mobility, and racial integration in a medium-sized American city.

PI:  Selena Ortiz

The Pennsylvania Rural Health Model aligns incentives for providers to deliver value-based care and provides an opportunity for rural hospitals to transform the care they deliver to better meet community health needs by improving population health outcomes and quality of care while lowering costs.

CHCPR will be conducting a formative evaluation of the Rural Health Model utilizing qualitative and quantitative methodology and will be providing project management leadership for the project.

PI:  Lisa Davis

When a sexual assault examination is performed at one of our partner hospitals, one of SAFE-T Center’s expert nurses participates through telehealth. The expert nurse appears on a screen where she can talk to, and support, both the on-site nurse and the victim. Though our specialized digital telehealth technology, she can also see the live exam in progress, ensuring best practices, proper evidence collection and a safe, helpful environment for the victim.

PI: Sheridan Miyamoto

Identifying drivers of variation in care along the breast and cervical cancer care continuum is essential to ensuring military Service members and their families receive high quality, high value care. This study particularly focuses on established, high value services such as breast and cervical cancer screening, HPV vaccination, and receipt of guideline concordant adjuvant radiation therapy following breast-conserving surgery (BCS) for breast cancer patients, which have all been shown to lead to improved health outcomes and are cost-effective. The goal of the study is to use the compulsory nature of the Permanent Change of Station (PCS) to better understand if practice patterns and other supply factors can explain variations in care. This has important implications for understanding utilization and outcome variation as well as cost implications.

PI:  Joel Segel

Accurate real-time prediction of virus spread is essential for making the health system respond in a fast and proactive manner to disease variations and disruption events (e.g., travel restrictions). Continuous flow modeling with nonlinear stochastic differential equations (NSDEs) is more efficient in real-time prediction of human traffic and virus spreading. However, very little has been done to characterize and model nonlinear stochastic dynamics in the human traffic and coronavirus pandemic with NSDE models.

PI:  Hui Yang

As local health care providers close locations and cancel procedures, it is critical to understand the impact on receipt of necessary care as well as be able to identify and triage what care may need to be addressed when the immediate pandemic finally wanes. This project aims to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on three types of necessary care over three time periods: initial (March, April); early (May, June); and middle (July, August).

PI:  John Moran & Joel Segel

New drugs to treat hepatitis C virus (HCV) are innovative, but their high prices impose financial pressures on the health care system. A debate is ongoing over how to prioritize those treatments. This project examines use of new HCV drugs and the effects of those drugs on patients’ health outcomes in Medicare while providing important information needed to develop coverage decisions and policies to ensure patients’ access to needed drugs while managing spending.

PI:  Jeah Jung